2006 Word of the Year

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first
Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community
are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show's
host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority
vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast
on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the
American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather
than concepts or facts known to be true."